Eleven Kinds of Loneliness was published by Little, Brown in 1962, a year after Revolutionary Road had announced Richard Yates as a major new voice in American fiction. If the novel was a sustained portrait of one marriage’s collapse, the story collection demonstrated that Yates’s vision extended across the entire spectrum of American disappointment — from tuberculosis wards to elementary school classrooms, from army barracks to Manhattan apartments where people drink too much and say the wrong things at parties.
The Collection
The eleven stories share a common geography — the terrain of people who are not quite good enough, not quite smart enough, not quite lucky enough to achieve the lives they imagined for themselves. This is not dramatic failure — there are no criminals, no spectacular collapses. These are the ordinary failures of ordinary people: the teacher whose students don’t respect her, the ex-soldier who can’t hold a job, the couple whose conversation reveals the emptiness at the centre of their marriage.
Key stories include:
“Doctor Jack-o’-Lantern” — A new student at a school for maladjusted children tries too hard to impress his classmates, with results that are painful to read. Yates’s ear for the specific cruelties of childhood is devastating.
“The Best of Everything” — A young woman prepares for her wedding while gradually realising that the man she is marrying is not the man she wanted. The story’s final image — Grace crying in a taxi — is one of the most perfectly achieved endings in American short fiction.
“A Wrestler with Sharks” — A would-be writer works at a trade magazine, failing at both his job and his art. The story captures the specific humiliation of being bad at something you don’t care about while being unrecognised at something you do.
“Builders” — A cab driver who considers himself a writer hires a ghostwriter to turn his ideas into stories. The relationship between the two men — one who has ideas but no craft, one who has craft but no ideas — becomes a parable about the gap between ambition and ability.
Yates’s Method
Yates’s technique in these stories is one of surgical restraint. He does not comment, does not editorialize, does not pity his characters. He simply records — with extraordinary precision — the exact words people use when they are making mistakes, the exact gestures that reveal self-deception, the exact moments when possibility closes down.
The title’s claim of eleven “kinds” of loneliness is not quite accurate — there is really only one kind, endlessly varied: the loneliness of people who cannot bridge the gap between who they believe themselves to be and who they actually are. Yates’s characters are not villains or fools. They are decent people trapped by their own limitations, and the reader’s recognition of those limitations — because they are the reader’s limitations too — is what gives the stories their terrible power.
Publication and Context
The first edition was published by Little, Brown, Boston, in 1962. First printings are identified by:
- Little, Brown imprint on title page
- “First Edition” stated on copyright page (or absence of later printing notices)
- Price of $4.50 on dust jacket front flap
- Cloth binding
The collection appeared at a difficult moment for the American short story. The form was being squeezed between the commercial demands of magazines (where most stories were published) and the experimental ambitions of the avant-garde. Yates’s stories were defiantly traditional in form — realistic, character-driven, emotionally direct — and they found a smaller audience than they deserved.
Critical Reputation
Eleven Kinds of Loneliness was praised on publication but sold modestly. Over the following decades, as Yates’s reputation faded and then was spectacularly revived in the early 2000s, the collection came to be regarded as one of the essential American story collections — ranked with Hemingway’s In Our Time, Cheever’s The Stories of John Cheever, and Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.
Richard Ford called Yates “the most unjustly overlooked writer in America.” Stewart O’Nan’s 1999 essay “The Lost World of Richard Yates” helped spark the revival that led to new editions and a film adaptation of Revolutionary Road.
Collecting Eleven Kinds of Loneliness
First edition (Little, Brown, 1962): Fine copies in dust jacket are scarce and valuable — $500–$1,500. The small print run (story collections never sold well) and the book’s canonical status among writers and collectors make this one of the most sought-after postwar story collections.
Signed copies are extremely rare. Yates was not famous enough during the 1960s to generate signing requests, and his later years were consumed by alcoholism and obscurity. Authenticated signed copies command significant premiums — $2,000–$5,000.
UK first edition: Quite scarce. $200–$500 for fine copies.
The collection sits alongside Revolutionary Road as a cornerstone Yates title. The combination of literary importance, small initial print run, and Yates’s rediscovery in the 2000s has made it one of the better appreciating postwar collectibles.